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Thursday, March 08, 2012

Why do Americans pronounce non-English words in such a pretentious way?

Everybody else in the world, including the Iraqis, puts the emphasis on the second syllable of "Baghdad". Not the Americans. They put it on the first. Where do they get that idea from?

I watched Midnight In Paris last night. This is about Americans in Paris and therefore it's full of similarly mangled versions of well-known foreign words. Parisians becomes "Pareezhuns". The painter Monet is "Moanay". The sculptor Rodin is "Row-Dan". When the Sorbonne is first mentioned it's "Sorebone". The Boeuf Bourguignon is "Boeuf Berniown". The splendid old Peugeot which picks Owen Wilson up every night is a "Poojoe". This is not exclusively a problem with French words either. The well-known flat bread popular in Greece is "Peter Bread".

Obviously no nation is blameless in this regard but there's something about the way that many Americans - particularly sophisticated Americans, the kind you get in Woody Allen films - deliver these words that suggests that they feel that even the way the locals do it isn't sufficiently pretentious for them.

I had a trying time when living in America emphatically attempting to instruct the natives on the correct, i.e. Italian, pronounciation of 'Oregano', they stress the second syllable which renders the word itself almost comical but also unrecognisable: 'Oh Reg oh no.'

I'm going to shamelessly take this thread as an opportunity to complain about the increasing adoption of U.S. date-speak by British broadcasters, wherein we now frequently hear "March Ninth" instead of "March THE Ninth" and, even more annoyingly, "Two Thousand Twelve" instead of "Two Thousand AND Twelve". These things matter.

There is sometimes - just sometimes - method in the madness. "Oregano" comes to us from Spanish, where the stress is indeed on the second syllable (as it is in Italian; the commenter who says it's not is mistaken). Even the Cousins' extravagant pronunciation of "Caribbean" is actually a bit closer to the original Caribe (ka-REE-beh) than ours.

And we should be mindful of the risk of any such discussion ending up as a glasshouse-stone (sorry, "rock") interface. There is no excuse, none at all, for the now-pretty-much-standard UK pronunciations "eye-BEE-thuh" and "chuh-RITZ-oh". (Presumably people come back with churitzo on trips to Barchelona.)

One noted difference between British English and American English is the pronunciation of words from French. In British English the stress typically goes on the first syllable, while in American English, the stress goes on the last syllable. In French, all syllables are equal, so neither the British nor the American pronunciation is "correct" for a French speaker.

Another thing to remember: American English is not British English. It doesn't sound the same as British English because it is a different dialect. It's not bad or wrong for these differences to exist.